It was an Olympic Games where Team USA once again proved it was the World’s #1 Track & Field Team, winning a total of 29 medals in London, well ahead of second place Russia (18). It was the most U.S. Olympic track and field medals since winning 30 at the 1992 Barcelona Games, when MTV had just introduced a show called “The Real World” and Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” was approaching a near three month stay atop the Billboard Charts.
TEAM USA SUPERLATIVES
Allyson Felix (200m, 4x100m, 4x400m) became the first woman since Florence Griffith-Joyner in 1988 to win three gold medals at a single Olympic Games.
This was the first time U.S. women – Brittney Reese (gold), Janay DeLoach (bronze) – have won two medals in the long jump.
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Shattering the world record by .55 seconds, the women’s 4x100m (40.82) recorded the largest drop in the record in the modern era.
Will Claye’s pair of medals in the horizontal jumps – bronze in the long jump and silver in the triple jump – marks the first time since 1936 that any man has medaled in both jumps at the Olympic Games and the first American to do so since Meyer Prinstein in 1904.
BIGGEST MEDAL HAUL IN 20 YEARS AT THE OLYMPIC GAMES